Our Fling With Bing Has Lost Its Zing

It’s time for Microsoft to put the champagne back on ice: Bing’s market share gains are starting to evaporate.

StatCounter was the first to dare suggest that Bing was losing its sting, but now new Hitwise data suggests both Bing and Yahoo have lost US audience share in the past month:

At first glance, it looks like Bing has lost 5 percentage points of market share, but the "-5%" represents a 5% decline in its share. It dropped from 16.96% to 16.38% (not 16.96% to 11.96%).

We should note that Ask.com deserves some credit for increasing its search share by 8% (from 2.37% to 2.56%).

Of course, this could be a blip–or perhaps Bing’s earlier growth was the blip–but what’s you take on this reversal of good fortunes?

http://www.seo-theory.com/ Michael Martinez

You’re talking about PAGEVIEWS, Andy. These numbers could just mean people find what they are looking for sooner than on Google, whose pageviews/visit ratios have always been higher than industry average.

And just look at the crappy quality of Google search results these days.

So, yeah, you like Google, but the market share numbers have been nonsense for several years now.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is a flash in the pan. The ‘decision oriented’ results that makes Bing so uniques isn’t even activated every time a user makes a query. It only works for popular nouns such as ‘Xbox 360′ or ‘Toyota Prius’.

http://www.searchenginerankings.com.au Arrow SEO

Google is so dominating. I’m wondering what the future holds for other search engines?